What is the process that brings a poet from an initial idea, or a profound feeling, to a composition in verse? What can a meditation on this process teach us, if anything, about the human mind, or about the inner nature of thought and creativity? To ask these questions and to attempt to answer them is an exercise in what Gaston Bachelard calls “psychological poetics.”1placeholder But I would like to take this project further and ask whether a reflection on the nature and dynamics of poetic creation can lead to any insights of the metaphysical order regarding the nature of causality and creation more generally. In other words, is it possible for a “psychological poetics” to provide an opening onto a kind of “metaphysical poetics”? In order to answer this question, we will draw upon two of the most compelling accounts of a “metaphysical theory” of artistic invention: those of Plotinus (d. 270) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941).
First, we may begin by recognising that the task of the poet is to unfold ideas into images, and images into words. The material of his peculiar kind of invention is thus twofold: on the one hand, it is images, and, on the other, it is words, along with their sound, ordering, and rhythm, which convey these images and bear them along their course. The nature and status of this “image” in question first requires some immediate clarification. What do we mean by the “image,” and by the faculty of imagination more generally? Images are found, we might say, at different layers or levels of our psychological life. One layer that is well known to us, for example, is the dream-image. This is where the image is in its most fantastical form; the dream is the realm of pure image itself. But the dream-image is also the disinterested image, it is the uncertain image, insofar as it indicates the near-complete divestment of the sensory-motor self. The images of dream famously scatter and disperse themselves with very little rhyme or reason, exhibiting a great freedom from the order and regularity of waking life. When some kind of understanding or inner logic appears in the dream-image, it is detectable only by a tenuous thread.
Where else do we find the image in our conscious life? Above all, we should reply, in the memory. The memory-image is where we most often encounter the “image-making” power at work: sometimes it appears by spontaneous or undesired intervention, and sometimes it appears by an effort of deliberate recollection. The memory-image exhibits a certain peculiar kinship, on the one hand, with sense-perception, and, on the other, with the disinterested state of dream: it doubtless takes its origins from some prior experience we have lived through, and it also furnishes the raw material for our oneiric representations.
Owing to the centrality of the memory-image in our ordinary psychological life, we find the persistent idea, throughout the history of philosophy, that the power of “imagination” more generally is only an attenuation of the memorial capacity, itself dependent upon the body for its operation.2placeholder David Hume famously declared that to imagine is to necessarily conjure a faint copy of perceptual experience. For him, sense-impressions and images do not differ as regards to their nature, but only “by degree”—specifically, by their degree of “force or vivacity.”3placeholder Hume grants that we may manipulate or combine these images, what he calls “simple ideas,” into more “complex ideas”; but, nevertheless, the “ideas” found in the imagination are supposed to be faint, nude archives of anterior impressions which were, at some point, ingested by the senses.4placeholder The kind of dependence in question is both substantial and causal: the relation of the copy to the original is one of asymmetrical dependence in content, as well as one of causal dependence of origin, so that the “impressions” can be said to be “the causes of our ideas.”5placeholder On this account, imagination is defined as a prolongation of the memory, itself a prolongation of the senses; it is the echo of external perception. If this is true, then all that the imagination is capable of doing is picturing, with fixed outlines, what has been. A mind working with these lingering traces could only ever rearrange the congealed elements of the past, like pieces of a mosaic, in a new order.
Surely Hume is somewhat correct in his bare recognition that there is no veritable creation ex nihilo in the realm of mind: the images that the memory provides us with indeed serve as the “raw material” or “prime matter,” as it were, for more complex imaginative work. But besides this “reproductive imagination” which merely resurrects or reproduces past experience, there appears to be a genuinely productive or creative imagination that exhibits its own sui generis quality.6placeholder In this case, the imagination does not simply reproduce elements of past experience in a new order, but rather, it organises, synthesises, and gathers together images under the influence of a profound interior cause or internal motivation. The imagination of the artist, the novelist, or the inventor is no longer passive, but instead reveals a fertile principle or activity, an effort which transmutes the inert image into a vehicle for an entirely novel expression. This power of voluntary hallucination, which is one and the same as the function of fantasy or fabulation, is at the source of all legends, myths, stories, folklore, and poems. It is found to be especially vibrant among young children. We might thus follow Bachelard and say that there is another layer or strata of images available to psychological life: what he calls the reverie-image or daydream-image. This is the home of the poet, and the material for his inventions. Unlike memories, the images that the poet develops need not correspond to definite moments of past time. His images are transformations or sublimations of reality, rather than imitations of it.7placeholder The poet’s image certainly communes with sense-experience, but it can no longer be said to be its inert superfetation, just as we cannot say that a rose is originated from the wall it climbs.
So, the poet develops an image—but what is it an image of; what is its source? It appears that, in any act of creative effort, the task of the artist is to translate an idea or sentiment that is, at first, implicit and obscure. He has in his mind something simple and abstract; something like a flutter of thought, a flicker of emotion, a sketch of a general composition. In order to bring this idea to life, it must process from the “less realised” to the “more realised”: the idea gradually takes on a form, is filled in with details, and, finally, communicates itself through distinct expression. But this process is not automatic; it is one of elaboration, often laborious, that requires a techne. In the poet’s case, it is the techne of words and metre; for the musician, it is sounds and notes; for the visual artist, it is skill with stone or paint. No matter the material of its invention, the creative act begins with something like an implicit sketch of the whole, and the end is only achieved by a distinct arrangement of the individual elements which, so to speak, give a matter to this form. In other words, poetic invention—and artistic invention more generally—proceeds from the abstract to the concrete, from the whole to the parts, from the implicit to the explicit, or from the idea to its expression.
In his essay on “Intellectual Effort,” Bergson describes the process of artistic creation as the development of what he calls the “dynamic scheme”: the scheme is an implicit idea which precedes and animates the composition, and which comes to be created, modified, and specified in the very course of its realisation. The scheme, like a seed, consists in a “reciprocal implication” of potent elements; the scheme does not, however, clearly demonstrate these individuated elements, but rather it only indicates the direction of mental effort which the artist must follow in order to unfold them.8placeholder The act of invention consists precisely in the effort of converting the scheme into distinct images, of causing the unity of thought to descend into a multiplicity of particulars. Finally, the result of this effort of realisation is a certain reciprocal adaptation between the form and the matter, between the initial idea and the work which comes to embody or materialise it.
The notion of the “dynamic scheme” is brought into relief by a meditation on the way that we understand a poem. To understand a poem is not to travel from individual words to their “meanings,” or from particulars to the “general idea.” To understand a poem first requires that we replace ourselves within a certain mental attitude: a mental attitude of sympathy which inserts us into the general tone or mood of the author, with the sentiment that inspires and traverses the individual words. The whole art of writing or oration consists in using rhythm, vocabulary, and punctuation to imitate and express the very continuity of thought, so that the reader or listener follows it “as if he were thinking it for himself.”9placeholder This is further revealed by the fact that the poet profits from a diversity of images in order to communicate said feeling or idea. For example, in Baudelaire’s “Spleen,” the poet gives us the sky weighing heavy upon us like a lid; the earth as a damp dungeon; Hope personified is a bat beating its wings against the walls; tears form like prison bars over the eyes; spiders weave webs in the mind; church bells pierce the air against this scene; and, finally, he shows us a slow funeral procession, where a despot in the form of Anguish plants a black flag upon a rotting skull. What is the resemblance between these images? It is not an “objective” resemblance. Rather, what unites and weaves them together is the thread of feeling which generates them and lays them alongside each other—in this case, it is that of despair, depression, or true sorrow. In fact, notes Bergson, by choosing diverse images, the poet impedes any one of these images from usurping the original intuition which the image is charged to summon.10placeholder The poet succeeds when he makes the original intuition the centre around which multiple images come to gather themselves, together forming an organism that expresses the motivation of the soul of the author.
The poetic imagination may be described thus far as the tendency to spontaneously transform an obscure idea into clear images, and to cause these images to descend into linguistic expression. With this idea of the “dynamic scheme,” we find Bergson as the modern heir of the Plotinian logos. As Dillon notes, Plotinus goes beyond Plato in the value that he places on the artistic or creative imagination.11placeholder For Plotinus, the imagination is Janus-like: besides synthesising and reproducing sense-data “from below” (i.e., from external sensation), the imagination is also the recipient or “mirror” of intellectual activity or noesis “from above.”12placeholder This pure thought is an “indivisible,” it is “without parts,” and, as such, it “never rises to the surface of consciousness”—we might even say that it is unconscious.13placeholder In order for the mind to apprehend it, the contents of this implicit or obscure thought must be “drawn out of the thought and into the imagination [in order to] reflect the thought as though in a mirror.”14placeholder The lower side of the imagination, the sensible side, is the parallel of the “reproductive imagination” we spoke of earlier: its goal is to unify, insofar as it moves from a multiplicity (e.g., manifold perceptions ingested by the senses) to a unity (the image of this world to the mind in memory and future imaginings). But the goal of the superior imagination, the “intellectual imagination” which is the parallel of the creative or productive faculty, is instead to divide: here the imagination takes for its object, not the sensible world, but pure thought itself.15placeholder The role of the logos in this process is to arrest or reflect this thought in images, and to thereby cause the thought to descend from the noetic to the dianoetic self. In this way, writes Warren, “conscious apprehension [antilepsis] in imagination arrests the motion of soul-thought and shapes it into a stable image.”16placeholder For, in order to illuminate the idea consciously before the mind so that it can be explicitly apprehended, we must pay the price of bringing this idea to commune with sense-knowledge. The role of this superior imagination is thus to produce images, through the articulatory logos, of noetic thought—of the psyche before distinct expression.
Therefore, for Plotinus as for Bergson, the first stage of expression is the image.17placeholder While the image communes with the sensible, it is, in reality, a more elevated form of apprehension than ordinary sense-perception, because the dynamic nature of the image symbolises the mutual inherence of ideas which characterises the domain of the intelligible. It is because the image can be of an extremely rich dynamism, because it is designed to develop and transform as one contemplates it, that it can lend itself to a deeper comprehension of supra-sensible reality, insofar as it points back in the direction of the inexpressible psyche. The second stage of expression is then from image to word. At this point, the image ceases to be interior to thought. With the solidification of thought into words comes a spatio-temporal projection and a discursive unfolding: there is now a disjunction between the thinking subject and the thought object, indicated in Plotinus by the prefix dia–, as in dianoia. The word is a translation of the initial intellectual impulsion, itself supra-linguistic. Admittedly, there are degrees of faithful translation, and in this consists the art of poetry. The truly faithful translations are those formulations which bear with themselves a fertile power or force of suggestion—the words which awaken a love or desire in the audience, compelling them to admire something nobler than the work produced, namely, the inspiration that produced it.18placeholder As Bréhier writes in his commentary on the Enneads, poetic language is made “not for designating things, but for suggesting to the soul the desired attitude capable of directing the listener towards the ineffable vision.”19placeholder
For the Greeks, the logos indicates, on the one hand, a generative or informing power, and, on the other hand, a discourse. In Plotinus, this logos takes on two meanings: it is at once psychological and metaphysical. In both cases, the role of the logos is to unfold something unified at a higher level of reality into multiplicity at a lower level. The metaphysical role takes place in the cosmos and is applicable to the descendent layers of reality or hypostases. Thus, each hypostasis is said to be the “logos” of the superior: the world is the logos of Soul, Soul is the logos of Intellect, and Intellect is the logos of the One. But Plotinus gives a new meaning to this term when he finds the psychological role of the logos at the level of the human soul. One of the great originalities of Plotinian thought lies in this discovery: that the metaphysical reality of procession is accessible via the psychological experience of expression. The experience we have of unfolding a unified idea into distinct elements, this movement of descent from idea to image to word, is equally what defines “procession” at the cosmological level.20placeholder This vision implies that we are capable of passing from a “psychological poetics” to a “metaphysical poetics” by the recognition that the translation of ideas in the realm of thought is the analogue of what takes place in the domain of life in general. The translation of ideas into words especially resembles the passage from the living seed to the plant or animal: hence why the “logos at work” is called the logos spermatikos by the Neoplatonists.
This amounts to saying that we observe, in the act of poetic or artistic creation, something like what Bergson calls “the growing materialisation of the immaterial,” itself characteristic of life and nature in general.21placeholder If we desire to know how this process works, however, he finds that we must investigate “the general and metaphysical problem of causality.”22placeholder Bergson comes to address this “metaphysical problem of causality” in his masterful 1907 work Creative Evolution, in which he defends the causal category of genuine creation as one that exists halfway between mechanism and radical finalism. For, even in the process of elaboration from the scheme to the composition, we find, above all, the active force or presence of the will as that which either causes the idea to descend or to remain unexpressed (hence, the intellectual effort and technical labour involved in any creative process). By this, we stumble upon the role of the unforeseen in the act of invention: the images or words, coming to fill in the initial scheme, turn back upon the scheme to both modify it and transform it, perhaps even radically so.23placeholder Sometimes, there may even remain nothing of the original scheme in the finalised image. The intuition which precedes the act is thus not given tout d’un coup, nor is it already completed; rather, it completes itself in the measure and thanks to the word which incarnates it. By contrast, Plotinus (unlike most contemporary philosophers) thinks that expressing our thoughts in words is always a sign of deficiency.24placeholder The expression, though important, is just an approximation, and will forever remain inferior to its model. This difference in perspective between Bergson and Plotinus can be understood, in metaphysical terms, as the distinction between a metaphysics of creation and a metaphysics of procession. According the first perspective, the work of creation itself adds something to the initial idea and, by this, gives it a new and heretofore unreached value. The second perspective maintains that the work always and necessarily marks a deficiency from its source. Is there, then, a limit that is inaccessible to expression and materialisation, and which exhausts itself in vain and desperate efforts in order to reach it? I myself have not decided one way or the other; and we even see Bergson, by the time of his final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), returning to the Plotinian thought that the matter of creation imposes a compromise upon the original creative spirit. But I do think that there is a middle ground. What if the real value in any artistic work is the fact that, once produced, it is only then capable of being communicated and shared with others? The poem invites others into the act of poetic creation; it directs the reader’s mind to encounter that ineffable source, to participate in that inspiration or intuition—intangible, mystical, universal—and to communicate to them that genuine creative emotion which is, above all else, desire or love.
Works Cited
Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin, 1986.
⎯⎯⎯ De Memoria. In Aristotle on Memory, edited and translated by Richard Sorabji. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de la rêverie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960.
⎯⎯⎯ La Poétique de l’espace. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
Bergson, Henri. « Effort intellectuel » in L’Énergie spirituelle. Edited by Frédéric Worms. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018.
⎯⎯⎯ « Âme et corps » in L’Énergie spirituelle. Edited by Frédéric Worms. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018.
⎯⎯⎯ « Introduction à la métaphysique » in La Pensée et le mouvant. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1934.
Bréhier, Émile. Notes to Ennéades VI, 9. In Plotin : Ennéades, edited by Émile Bréhier. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1924.
Dillon, John. “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagintion.” In Religious Imagination, edited by James P. Mackey, 55–64. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.
Plotinus. The Enneads. Edited and translated by Lloyd P. Gerson et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Warren, E. W. “Imagination in Plotinus.” The Classical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1966): 277–285.
Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 14.
See Aristotle, De Anima 403a8–10, 428b10ff; cf. De Memoria 449b31ff in Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1.1.1.7, 1.1.7.5.
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1.1.1.5.
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1.1.1.8.
See the famous distinction between the reproductive and productive imagination provided by Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A115ff.
Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: PUF, 1957), 8: The poetic image is “not the echo of the past. On the contrary, through the bursting forth of the image, the distant past reverberates in echoes, and one can scarcely perceive the depths in which these echoes will go forth, resound, and be extinguished. In its novelty, in its activity, the poetic image has its own being, a proper dynamism.”
Henri Bergson, « L’effort intellectuel » in L’Énergie-spirituelle (ES) (Paris: PUF, 2018), 160: “I mean, by this [idea of the dynamic scheme], that the idea does not contain the images themselves, so much as the indication of what we must do to reconstruct them.”
Bergson, « Âme et corps » in ES, 46.
Bergson, « Introduction à la métaphysique » in La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 210–211.
John Dillon, “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination” in Religious Imagination, ed. James P. Mackey (Edinburgh: Edimburgh University Press, 1986), 57, 60. Cf. Enn. V, 8.
See Enn. I, 4, 10.
Enn. IV, 3, 30.
Enn. IV, 3, 30, emph. added.
Enn. III, 6, 18: “logos in motion or the motion from it is a dividing [the setting of limits].”
E. W. Warren, “Imagination in Plotinus,” The Classical Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1966): 282.
Enn. V, 8, 6: after wisdom, where everything is united, comes the image.
In the words of Plotinus, this kind of musical expression is not a “weakening” (asthenia) of intuition, but rather, is its “accompaniment” (parachlouthema theoris): see Enn. III, 8, 3, emph. added: “Everywhere, doing and making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of the vision-attunement, if the doer was aiming at the things done; complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the mere work produced.”
Emile Bréhier, notes to Enn. VI, 9 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1928), 166, emph. added.
Enn. III, 6, 18: “Matter awaits … ready to submit to what the active cause desires. This cause, proceeding from intelligible reasons … is just like the discursive reason whose movement distributes itself into the images of imagination.”
« L’effort intellectuel » in ES, 188.
« L’effort intellectuel » in ES, 188, emph. added.
« L’effort intellectuel » in ES, 174.
See Enn. III, 8, 6.